This book is the work of an impostor. Who would know this better than the author himself, the Spanish graphic designer and copywriter José Luis González Macías. He says in the first paragraph of his foreword that he is not an expert in the field of lighthouses and calls himself a landlubber. He continues to write that he has not even visited a single one of the three dozen buildings that his “Small Atlas of Lighthouses at the End of the World” honors.
Nevertheless, the Spanish Ministry of Culture named the original edition the most beautiful book of the year in 2020. Without knowing the competition, one can easily say: an excellent choice. González Macías doesn’t focus on technical details, nor is he concerned with sailor’s yarn and certainly not with superlatives. But about stories.
About rumors and secrets on the one hand, and about the passion of engineers and architects on the other. Last but not least, he was also fascinated by curiosities. And he weaves all of these stories together with his illustrations, which reflect reality and at the same time create moods that only exist in the graphic designer’s imagination or that have their origin in the anecdotes that González Macías has researched.
He made a roughly pixelated drawing of each of the lighthouses, a night scene in black, white and turquoise – as well as a subtle shade of yellow for each beacon. In addition, on the following double page, there is a schematic sketch as in a construction plan with – albeit very brief – technical information as well as a generous nautical map rather than a map in which the respective lighthouse is located.
González Macías has never been to any of the places he depicts – but you still don’t have to call him an impostor.
(Photo: José Luis González Macías/Mare Verlag)
You can lose yourself in these seemingly simple illustrations, they exploit the romantic idea of being a hermit by the sea, but at the same time they contain the dangerous, forbidding and lonely nature of a lighthouse keeper’s existence. José Luis González Macías very elegantly combines the civilized with the extra-civilized in his drawings.
And he has a penchant for failure: of engineers, of lighthouse keepers, of politicians. The current Eddystone lighthouse in front of the English port city of Plymouth is the fifth at this location; some previous buildings did not withstand the weather. Other lighthouses have mysteriously lost their staff at some point, which has sometimes given rise to ghost stories.
To be included in this “Small Atlas of Lighthouses”, a tragicomic story like this also qualifies: In the 19th century, Mexico and France fought over Clipperton Island, an atoll in the Pacific. To demonstrate their claims to power, the French built a lighthouse on Clipperton. However, they never settled there permanently; today Clipperton is uninhabited. In the meantime, however, there was a kind of sect there that came to a tragic end. The lighthouse was only in operation from 1906 to 1917 and again from 1935 to 1938.
It’s unlikely that megalomania plays a role in this “Little Atlas” – without which grandeur and elegance can hardly be had. González Macías gives examples where lighthouses, primarily made of metal, were first exhibited, including at world exhibitions, to be admired by masses, before they were transported to their remote destination and finally erected there. The very first lighthouse in the book, the one built by Stanislav-Ajihol off the coast of Ukraine, at the mouth of the Dnieper into the Black Sea, is an unexpectedly delicate metal construction. Accordingly, González Macías pays tribute to its architect Vladimir Shukhov.
It is this empathy that clears José Luis González Macías from the accusation of imposture directed at himself.
Jose Luis González Macias: Small atlas of the lighthouses at the end of the world. Translated from Spanish by Kirsten Brandt. Mare Verlag, Hamburg 2023. 160 pages, 36 euros.